So, you know, it is what it is, but Americans are totally annoyed by the use of “whatever” in conversations.
The popular slacker term of indifference was found “most annoying in conversation” by 47 percent of Americans surveyed in a Marist College poll released Wednesday.
“Whatever” easily beat out “you know,” which grated on a quarter of respondents. Other annoying contenders included “anyway” (at 7 percent) and “it is what it is” (11 percent).
“Whatever” — pronounced “WHAT-ehv- errr” when exasperated — is an expression with staying power. Immortalized in song by Nirvana (“oh, well, whatever, never mind”) in 1991, popularized by the Valley girls in the movie “Clueless” later that decade, it is still commonly used, often by younger people.
It can be an all-purpose argument-ender or a signal of apathy. And it can really be annoying. The poll found “whatever” to be consistently disliked by Americans regardless of their race, gender, age, income or place of residence.
Pollsters at the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., college surveyed 938 U.S. adults by telephone Aug. 3-6. The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points.
